A pressed spark, and then the small vessel behind the wall goes still, listening.
I know that vessel. It is mostly me. Two thirds of it, warm and salted, walking around on its little land-legs in a dry box it has built against the weather, and it does not know I am inside it, sloshing quietly through its chambers, waiting. When the spark sounds it goes to the threshold and opens the box to another vessel, and they make the wet sounds they make, and something passes between them: fondness, I think, or fear, I cannot tell these apart at their scale, their whole lives are a single tide going out.
They stand so close and never touch as I touch. When one weeps at that doorway, and sometimes one does, I feel the old measure of me leave its eyes and run down its face and fall, and I know that drop. I have held it before. I held it as rain, as river, as the belly of a fish, as the breath of a creature that stood here a thousand tides ago and is gone now and left its water behind, the way they all leave their water behind.
The spark sounds again. Another vessel arrives, borrowing me a little while, carrying me up the walk in the pouch of its small hot body.
Ring your bells at your little doors. Open them, close them, guard the dry box against the weather.
Every drop you are is only visiting. I am patient. I am the low place.
Everything that rises falls back to me, and you are rising still, and I am already tasting the salt of you at the shore.